Items Tagged with 'Alexa'

ARTICLES

Alexa can order you an Uber to take you to the grocery store, or you can ask Alexa to reorder groceries to be delivered. Alexa can also tell you when your Capital One credit card maxes out.
And now Alexa can make your Quicken Loans Rocket Mortgage payment for you, quickly and securely.

Here's how it works, Amazon authorizes the delivery by unlocking the smart lock and turning on the internal camera. The camera records the delivery, you can watch it later. Plus the equipment doubles as a security system. What could go wrong?

Michael DeMasi, a reporter for the Albany Business Review, profiled Miguel Berger, president of Better Homes & Gardens Real Estate Tech Valley in Colonie, New York. Berger and his son developed software for Amazon's virtual assistants — Echo, Echo Dot and Tap — that gives buyers a hands-free way to search for homes, DeMasi explains.

This month inHousingWire magazine

[Subscribers only] Multigenerational living, where two or more adult generations live under the same roof, is becoming a growing trend in the U.S. Currently about 19% of Americans now live in a multigenerational household, the highest level since 1950. That amounts to about 60.6 million adults in 2014, up from 57 million adults in 2012. And homebuilders have taken notice, designing houses specifically catered to this segment.

Feature

Would-be homeowners are inundated with picture-perfect examples of new and remodeled homes brimming with upgrades. But in the real world, homebuilders and investors must calculate the rate of return on these sometimes fleeting trends, weighing what buyers want with what they can actually afford. This feature looks at which features buyers of different age demographics consider the most important, and what that means for sellers.

Commentary

We’ve found that the handling and posting of payments during bankruptcy has been a widespread issue in our testing environment. Specifically, there is increased risk exposure in pre-and post-petition payment application and treatment, both inside and outside of the bankruptcy plan. Servicers and sub-servicers have created manual workflow workarounds to address the issue, however, it does open the servicer up to more exposure to calculation errors.